SCENIC VISTAS: LANDSCAPE AS CULTURE IN EARLY NEW YORK, JEAN SHIN:BODIES OF WORK, and JEFF ZIMMERMAN: GLASS LIGHT NATURE.
SCENIC VISTAS: LANDSCAPE AS CULTURE IN EARLY NEW YORK, at Boscobel House and Gardens, Garrison, N.Y., through November 16, ‘25.
Kat Howard, Drawn and Quartered (2025), mixed media installation, Boscobel House and Gardens; Photo: David Ebony.
This unique and wonderfully eccentric Federal style Mid-Hudson Valley historic mansion with spectacular river views, suffered a major cataclysm in April 2024, when the entire ceiling of the great library collapsed without warning. No one was hurt, but it caused extensive damage to the overall structure, built between 1804 and 1808, as well as to the furniture and many decorative objects from the 17th- through the 19th century that were housed in the space. Now, after a 17-month, $1.2 million renovation, Boscobel reopens to the public with Scenic Vistas: Landscape as Culture in Early New York, which features a tasteful intervention of contemporary works among the treasured antiques. Participating contemporary artists include Kat Howard, Betsy Jacks, Kieran Kinsella, and James McElhinney, with site-specific installations by Alison McNulty and Jean-Marc Superville Sovak.
Jean-Marc Superville Sovak, Cruel Necessity/Unnecessary Cruelty (2025) detail of installation at Boscobel House and Gardens; Photo: David Ebony.
Organized by Boscobel’s executive director and curator Jennifer Carlquist, the exhibition highlights recent works in a variety of mediums that correspond to the natural setting of the place or directly address its history. Betsy Jacks’ paintings, for instance, show centralized images of tree trunks and branches that have an almost monumental feel. In several works, figures are enmeshed in the trees as if to convey a symbiotic relationship between humanity and nature. A number of works touch upon the fascinating but checkered history of Boscobel as a haven for Loyalists in the immediate post-Revolutionary War period. Kat Howard’s emotionally wrenching installation, Soft Mound, Drawn and Quartered (2025) is installed in a bedroom once occupied by Sarah Wilkinson, a “free” black woman, from the late 1700s until 1830. The work features a period bedframe, with meat hooks and a pile of raw cotton in the middle where a mattress should be, the whole overhung by a cotton quilt canopy. The bedroom, usually a place of respite, exudes here—paradoxically, perhaps—a sense of meditative unease. In his site-specific work, Jean-Marc Superville Sovak chose a wallpaper design of a pattern of oak leaves to cover the walls of the light-filled atrium. Long associated with Royalist sentiments, the oak leaf image here provides a background into which the artist has inserted fragmented photographic replicas of newspaper notices about a runaway slave who had escaped to the mid-Hudson Valley. This installation, like all the contemporary works on view at Boscobel, adds a layer of provocative and thoughtful narrative to this already fabled residence. —David Ebony
JEAN SHIN:BODIES OF WORK at the Dorsky Museum, New Paltz, N.Y., through December 7, ‘25.
Jean Shin, Huddled Masses (2020-2025), mixed media installation, at the Dorsky Museum; photo courtesy The Dorsky Museum.
An exceptional exhibition that serves as a concise career survey, Jean Shin: Bodies of Work features seven large-scale installations created over the past twenty years. The most recent work here, (Student Body (SUNY New Paltz), 2025, is a collaborative effort with students consisting of a towering curtain of stitched-together articles of clothing donated by students and resulting from a communal creative initiative. Born in South Korea and based in New York City, Shin is best known for installations featuring recycled, disused electronic communications devices and other equipment to create elaborate and fantastical spaces that underscore, among other things, the fleeting nature of technological innovation. One room, for instance, contains dozens of long strands of old slides—remember those?—hanging from the ceiling, and a continuously running projector now unable to reproduce these hapless images from a long-forgotten analog era.
Outstanding in the show, curated by the museum’s Sophie Landres, Huddled Masses (2020-2025) is a stunning conglomeration of disused flip phones and other cell phones and wires. The artist fashioned this techno-detritus into two vertically surging mounds of vaguely threatening anthropomorphic shapes. Another striking piece, TEXTile (2006) is an interactive work that features a wave of computer keys woven together into something like a magic carpet. Visitors can sit at one end of the piece and type away at a keyboard, with the letters appearing on a screen at the opposite end. This work was created the year that the influential Korean-born Fluxus artist and techno-critic Nam June Paik (1932-2006) passed away. In some respects, Shin may be regarded as his worthy heir in the way she reimagines, my means of these engaging installations, the ever mutable—and volatile—relationship between technology and humanity. —David Ebony
Jean Shin, TEXTile (2006), mixed media assemblage, at the Dorsky Museum; Photo: David Ebony.
JEFF ZIMMERMAN: GLASS LIGHT NATURE at Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center, through November 16, ‘25.
Jeff Zimmerman, Crumpled Vessel, from the Time Series (2023). photo courtesy R & Company and Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center.
Glass artist Jeff Zimmerman, who has perfected a classic Venetian glass-blowing technique he has been developing since 1988, creates vessels, light fixtures and purely sculptural objects. The works in this exhibition seem as if they have always been part of the Russel Wright home and Design Center at Manitoga. The organic forms that Wright favored in his work, and in the specialized way his home corresponds to the natural surroundings, are echoed in works by Zimmerman, who was raised in Colorado and is currently based in New York City and Portland, Oregon.
Jeff Zimmerman, Water Droplet. (2015), mirrored glass, at Manitoga / The Russel Wright Design Center; Photo: David Ebony.
Without demanding too much attention, Zimmerman’s luminous wall sconces, chandeliers and table lamps quietly yet dramatically illuminate the details of Wright’s graceful and rarified interiors. Under the auspices of design firm R & Company, Jeff Zimmerman: Glass Light Nature features mesmerizing works like Water Droplet (2015), a large, rather eroticized mirrored glass relief that protrudes from one wall like a shiny nipple or pacifier. Nonchalantly placed on a living room shelf, Crumpled Vessel, from the Time Series (2023) recalls a crushed metal painted sculpture by John Chamberlain. This and other works by Zimmerman demonstrate his harmonic sensitivity to the house. Crumpled Vessel’s reflective surface with green overtones, for instance, corresponds to the shimmering natural light and the verdant landscape visible just outside the nearby window. —David Ebony